Stopping the Suicidal

Preventing bad behaviour

From the start of the industrial revolution to the mid 20th century, we British have used town gas. It lit our streets, fired our boilers and cooked our roast dinners. 

Town gas was a by-product of the coke manufacturing industry.  Heating coal in the absence of oxygen removes the impurities and produces coke. This is mixed with iron to make steel.  All those unwanted impurities were collected to produce town gas, a fuel in itself.  During the Victorian, Edwardian and early Elizabethan years, town gas was used extensively throughout the UK.

All that changed in the 1960s when natural gas was discovered in the North Sea.  Natural gas was cheaper, cleaner and easier to produce than town gas.  So much so, that during the sixties and seventies the gas board spent hundreds of millions of pounds switching over the supply from town gas. Millions of domestic, commercial and industrial customers had their equipment — boilers, ovens, heaters and generators — converted to use natural gas.

A surprising correlation

During the same period as the gas conversion, suicide rates dropped.

When people noticed this drop, they tried to understand why it was happening. Was it…

• Better treatment for mental health problems?
• Higher uptake of the Samaritans help line?
• Improved living standards?

The investigation

The most common way to commit suicide in the early twentieth century was to place your head in an oven and switch on the gas. 

Town gas contained lots of carbon monoxide. This combines irreversibly with the haemoglobin in your blood.  With the haemoglobin taken out of action the blood can’t transport oxygen around the body, which in turn, results in death.

Gas poisoning was a simple, clean, effective and readily available way to commit suicide. Thousands of people did it every year.

Natural gas doesn’t have the same effect.  It contains lots of methane, but hardly any carbon monoxide, so whilst it may give you the mother of all headaches, a natural gas oven won’t kill you.

Public health officials came to the conclusion that, by removing the means to commit suicide, the gas transformation had stopped thousands of deaths.

A controversial finding

The idea that the reduction in deaths was down to the replacement of town gas was refuted strongly.  After all, there are a thousand and one ways to kill yourself.  Anybody motivated to commit suicide could just as easily jump off a bridge as put their head in an oven.

But there is the point.  It isn’t nearly as easy to jump of a bridge as stick your head in your own oven,  first you have to find a bridge and then you have to will yourself to jump off it.  All the other methods of committing suicide; hanging, shooting or drowning are significantly more difficult — and frightening — than putting your head in an oven. 

When you strip out the number of deaths due to carbon monoxide poisoning, it is very clear that the switch to natural gas saved thousands of lives.

Doing the right thing

The point of this unhappy little story is that if you want to change people’s behaviour, create an environment where it is easy to do the right thing, and hard to get things wrong.

If that approach can change the choices of people who are sufficiently motivated to commit suicide, then just imagine what it could do for the minor annoyances of the working day.

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Image by Tristram Brelstaff